With expectations around stakeholder engagement rising, it's increasingly important to have a strategic stakeholder relationship management plan in place. But even with a solid stakeholder engagement strategy, things can unravel once you start tracking and reporting on all communications, engagements, commitments, and issues with your stakeholders.
A made-for-purpose software solution is the easiest way to improve your stakeholder relationship management efforts, but what are your options?
Customer Relationship Management (CRM) software is designed around the sales process to help an organization push leads through a sales funnel. It centralizes customer information, tracks interactions, and facilitates communication across different departments to improve customer satisfaction, retention, and sales growth. Popular CRMs include HubSpot, Salesforce, and Microsoft Dynamics. They track deals and focus on sales, marketing, reporting, and analytics.
Using lead/customer-focused software like a CRM to manage stakeholder relationships and engagement doesn't make sense. You're not selling to your stakeholders; you're engaging with them.
Stakeholder Relationship Management (SRM) software is designed to help organizations effectively identify, manage, and engage with their stakeholders. Stakeholders include partners, regulators, government bodies, NGOs, Indigenous or Tribal Communities, land owners, business owners, and anyone interested in or influenced by a project's success or the organization's operations.
Managing engagement with all your unique stakeholders is vital because your stakeholder relationships can quickly grow and become overwhelming. Having the right software to help you stay organized is crucial to your organization's success. SRM software empowers you and your team to build strong stakeholder relationships by helping you manage all your stakeholder information and engagements in one defined space.
While CRM (Customer Relationship Management) and SRM (Stakeholder Relationship Management) software share similarities, they have distinct scopes, purposes, and target audiences. What's the difference, and what software should you choose?
While both systems offer a space to store data like contact information, they are very different overall regarding workflows, language, and embedded features.
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Aspect
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CRM
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SRM
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Focus
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Customers and sales relationships
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All stakeholder and Indigenous community relationships
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Scope
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Narrow (mostly customers)
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Broad (multiple stakeholder groups)
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Typical uses
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Sales, marketing, customer support
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Engagement project management, compliance, government relations, community engagement, partnership management, policy development, etc.
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Key features
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Deal pipeline, sales management, marketing automation, support tickets, sales reporting
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Stakeholder relationship management, engagement tracking, issue/risk management, engagement reporting
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Users
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Sales, marketing, customer service
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Stakeholder engagement, Indigenous relations, public affairs, ESG managers, compliance officers, communications professionals, nonprofit managers, etc.
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If you, your IT Manager or another member of your team is thinking of trying to make a CRM do the job of an SRM, consider the following before deciding:
CRMs are customer-focused, but don't have stakeholder workflows, making managing stakeholder relationships significantly more challenging.
CRMs are customer-focused and typically require substantial customizations to meet stakeholder engagement needs. However, when you customize a CRM, the approach is usually to "set-it-and-forget-it," meaning there's no future stakeholder engagement support or maintenance. Any stakeholder engagement-specific updates or customizations will cost more money at the organization's expense, not the CRM vendor. These hidden costs associated with the necessary customizations do not guarantee that the configured software will meet your and your team's stakeholder engagement goals.
Getting your team on board with new software is often difficult, but introducing software that isn't made to meet your team's needs makes it even more challenging. Using a CRM to do something it isn't built for will overly complicate your process, resulting in low adoption rates by your team. This will make the potential for collaboration difficult, if not impossible.
Forcing a CRM to fit your stakeholder engagement needs leaves your projects and programs open to threats. These threats can arise from the inevitable gaps in the CRM, where it can't fully meet your stakeholder engagement management needs. Consider what could happen if your project gets audited. An SRM will help you quickly report on all the data you need in the proper format. In contrast, a CRM can get complicated and messy quickly, leaving you open to repercussions (e.g., from gaps in your engagement history).
The substantial customizations a CRM will need mean you won't be up and running quickly. It will require extra time to develop the necessary add-on modules and to create the workflows you and your team will follow, which wastes valuable resource time.
There is no surer way to destroy stakeholder trust than by failing to address issues or commitments effectively. The SRM "out-of-the-box" issues and commitment management capabilities mean the software has designated spaces for you to store, track, and analyze all your unique stakeholders' concerns or grievances, as well as promises or benefit agreements. Having a defined space for this information will help you organize and manage tasks effectively, which is vital as issues and commitments are often time-sensitive.
With these capabilities, you won't waste time making software that meets your needs (which you would do with a CRM). SRM software comes ready to use and meets your stakeholder relationship management needs, allowing you to focus your resources on the other crucial areas of your project.
However, not all SRMs are created equal, so take the time to look for SRM software that helps you quickly and easily record, track and report on information like:
To learn more about how Jambo can simplify your stakeholder engagement, book a 15-minute discovery call with a Jambo expert!